This was stunning and enthralling in a way I haven’t felt since reading The Starless Sea, I think. There’s many layers here — four timelines ranging from 1912 to 2401, time travel, an anomaly in space-time connecting all of these — that build slowly at first but which make the book unputdownable from about the halfway point.

There was also a meta-ness to this that I simultaneously liked and was jarred by: one of the briefest timelines takes place in January 2020; another in 2203 when the SARS 12 pandemic takes over the narrative, causing the author protagonist of that timeline to go into lockdown. That author had been catapulted to success by her fourth novel, which happened to be about a pandemic but was written before the SARS 12 pandemic struck. (This sounds a lot like Emily St. John Mandel’s experience.)

All this talk about pandemics and time travel probably make The Sea of Tranquility sound futuristic and bleak, but at its core, it’s about humanity and hopefulness. I was enthralled but also, oddly, soothed reading this.

I just need to find out what happened to Vincent in 2019, and it appears I need to read The Glass Hotel to do that!

3.5 stars....I definitely enjoyed this (agree with others who mention it is a bit slow to get going) but not as much as her others. I appreciate how her writing is sparse, yet I always find myself fully believing in the world and the characters. It's quite a short novel, so I almost wonder if I was left a bit wanting and that's what moved me to put it 3.5 instead of 4?

Thank you to both Netgalley and Libro.fm. I listened to half and read half 😊 (less)

With time travel, multiple timelines, moon colonies, and references to the author's previous novels Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel has written another brilliant novel of speculative fiction. Her writing is so eloquent and ethereal; she creates worlds not unlike our own, but with a futuristic or dystopian spin. Reading her feels like being in a daydream. I'm a big fan of Mandel I love her writing and I loved this novel.

The story revolves around the same point in multiple timelines. Different characters will chance upon a glitch of crossed timelines involving a forest, violin music, and an airship terminal. Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is sent back in time to investigate. As he travels across three centuries, he meets and interviews the people who are all tied to this anomaly. The story travels from Vancouver Island, to Earth colonies, and to moon colonies. The scenery is detailed so well, it all feels so real and tangible.

There is no need to read her previous two novels in order to enjoy this novel. If you have read them, then it's a bonus gift for you as you get to revisit earlier characters and plots as they are fluidly woven into the new storyline. The story even gets a little meta, as the author portrayed in the book is on a book tour during a pandemic, after previously written a book about a pandemic.

I highly recommend this novel. Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Just WOW! Emily’s novels just get me good!
I love the ethereal quality of her stories, dream-like yet grounded in the essence of what makes us human. This story is hard to pin-point, it has time travel, parallel timelines and characters we’ve encountered in previous novels, yet I just let the beauty and loneliness of its tale wash over me. I don’t mind an ambiguous ending, but be warned if you need a neat bow! But for me this is my best if the year so far, by far.

Book review: Author explores huge questions in 'Sea of Tranquility'
By ASHLEY RIGGLESON FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR 16 hrs ago

I have loved Emily St. John Mandel’s work in the past. So, I jumped into her newest novel, “Sea of Tranquility,” synopsis unseen. My verdict: It was not what I expected, but it was bizarre and brilliant.

“Sea of Tranquility” has many perspectives and moves back and forth in time. As the novel opens, readers are introduced to Edwin St. Andrew. It’s 1912, and Edwin is the youngest of three brothers. He comes from a high-class family in England, but he does not expect to inherit anything from his parents. And when he discusses some radical (for the time) political positions at his parents’ dinner party, he is almost immediately sent to Canada. Once there, a strange and inexplicable event happens in a forest.

The novel then quickly takes off and follows several different people: Mirella (who some might remember from “The Glass Hotel”); Olive, a novelist on a book tour in 2203; and a man struggling to find meaning in his life in 2401.

Because the novel changes perspectives and even centuries so quickly, I found this latest from Mandel to be initially confusing, and it was somewhat difficult to get into it. At first, I wondered how these disparate pieces were connected, but as soon as Mandel’s purpose came apparent (for me around the halfway point), I was hooked.

Although there is a clear storyline here, it helped me to consider “Sea of Tranquility” as an elaborate thought experiment.

Mandel explores huge philosophical questions, asking about the nature of reality and what makes a life worth living. She also ponders what we are willing to give up so that we can live by our principles.

A lot of you must be thinking, “What makes this novel worth reading?” Well, Mandel’s prose is beautiful, her settings vivid, her characters sympathetic, and her plot masterfully constructed. After my initial hiccups, I sped through this novel. I found “Sea of Tranquility” to be so compelling that I will think about this book for a long time. It is truly a beautiful novel, ethereal poignant, and powerful.

This is a book so unique, only Mandel could have written it. I came away from this novel with a greater respect for the human condition, and I am sure other readers, too, will find solace in these pages if they would only turn them.

Ashley Riggleson is a freelance reviewer from Rappahannock County.


More Information
SEA OF TRANQUILITY

By Emily St. John Mandel

(Knopf, $25, 272 pages)

Published: April 5, 2022

This review was originally printed in the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, VA.

https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/books/2022/04/04/emily-st-john-mandel-lets-her-imagination-roam-in-time-hopping-sea-of-tranquility/?outputType=amp&fbclid=IwAR3neeO5Flxsjlf1clxB3NoG0c7O1kS27jvdWdzPyXSoJ1vC4WyburZPHlo

Emily St. John Mandel lets her imagination roam in time-hopping ‘Sea of Tranquility’
The author weighs in on writing sci-fi and weaving her own experiences into her fiction.

By Joyce Sáenz Harris
6:00 AM on Apr 4, 2022 CDT

In 1912, a young “remittance man” — an earl’s third son who aimlessly emigrated to British Columbia — stumbles into a forest and encounters a brief, inexplicable anomaly in time: a violin being played in a vast, echoing space.

Two centuries later, a best-selling book about a pandemic has been published by a writer named Olive Llewellyn, and it has made her famous. In it, there’s a passage about a violinist busking in an Oklahoma airship terminal when, for a bizarre instant, he is surrounded by a forest.

How are these two things connected? How could a novelist born in a moon colony know such a thing once actually happened? How could a third person, a 21st-century girl, have experienced and recorded the same strange event in the same forest as the earl’s son in 1912? And how can a time-traveling secret agent from yet another future century discover the truth of the anomaly without disrupting time itself?

These are the questions at the heart of Sea of Tranquility, the new novel by Emily St. John Mandel. The author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel has said this story was inspired by one of her favorite novels, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and also by her lifelong fondness for speculative fiction. Elegantly written, heartbreaking and full of surprises, Sea of Tranquility will capture readers’ imagination and take them on a journey they will long remember. What, after all, is reading if it is not time travel?

This interview was conducted via email and edited for length.

*****
Q: In a passage of the book called “The Last Book Tour on Earth,” author Olive Llewellyn tells one interviewer: “I’ve never been interested in auto-fiction” — meaning, a form of fiction based on autobiography. But many of the events in Olive’s book tour felt as if they could’ve happened on your Station Eleven tour. Can you reveal if any of the anecdotes were inspired by reality? For example: Was there really a woman in Dallas who said she felt that the book “just ended”?

A: I meant that line as a joke, since I suspect most readers will quickly realize that that whole section is auto-fiction.

There’s obviously a strong sci-fi element through that section — Olive lives on the moon — but every interaction that she has on the road is entirely autobiographical. The overwhelming majority of my interactions with readers are entirely positive. Also, a woman really did tell me that she was surprised at how the book “just ended,” although I could no longer tell you for certain whether or not that was in Dallas.

Q: Olive seems to be your doppelgänger in the 23rd century, touring on behalf of the tie-in edition of a novel that sounds very much like Station Eleven. Later, three months into pandemic lockdown, she is working on “this crazy sci-fi thing” that sounds as if it might be Sea of Tranquility. Is this new novel your science-fiction debut, since it centers on time travel?

A: The whole question of genre is so slippery, isn’t it? … I have always loved sci-fi, and, in fact, growing up it was really mostly all I read. I think it’s possible that a more expansive way of looking at the question is to use the term “speculative fiction” instead, which I’d define as fiction in which the author’s speculating about what the future might look like. By that measure, I’d say that Station Eleven was my speculative fiction debut.

Q: So time travel wasn’t an interest you developed just for this book.

A: I’ve read a ton of sci-fi and have always been fascinated by time travel stories. I believe a lot of people are drawn to time travel without necessarily thinking of it in those terms — I think part of what explains the popularity of sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe is that, on some level, we harbor a longing to meet our ancestors.

Q: Thinking of the very real 10,000-year lease on a library in Cincinnati and the fictional Far Colonies out in Alpha Centauri: Did you mean for these two ideas, separated by centuries, to exemplify our desire to believe that human civilization will endure into an unknowable future?

A: That’s interesting; I hadn’t thought of that parallel. But you’re right, there’s definitely something there. I visited the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati a number of years ago and was delighted when the director told me about the 10,000-year renewable lease. It’s just one of the most wonderful facts I’ve ever encountered. What could be more hopeful than a 10,000-year lease on a library!

Q: Here and there, you dropped intriguing or troubling hints about future possibilities. The U.S. being broken up into sectors like the Republic of Texas, for one; Oklahoma City becoming a mid-continental airship hub; holographic meetings during a future pandemic, instead of Zoom videos; and the idea that within 100 years, China will be the world’s remaining superpower. Have you seen things happening that make you believe some of these changes might actually come to pass?

A: Those are all changes that seem plausible to me, but that doesn’t mean they’re inevitable. I think a lot of Americans, myself included, feel a deep unease about the current political landscape. It’s one thing to disagree on matters of policy, but it’s something else entirely to find oneself in a situation where different groups of people believe in entirely different versions of reality, and it’s hard to escape a queasy sense that the country is becoming increasingly ungovernable. Also, yes, I think eventually Zoom will probably involve sitting around in holographic rooms with your fellow holographs.

Q: I like the ideas that 200 years from now people still will be reading printed books, that there still will be coins to be thrown into musicians’ hats, and that human beings will live on the Sea of Tranquility. Do you ever envision how things might be in your grandchildren’s time, hoping certain things will change a lot and others not at all?

A: Yes, definitely. I did an interview recently where the interviewer was like, “I made a list of things that persist into the far future in your book, and it’s red velvet cake, cupcakes and misogyny.” It would be nice if only the first two things on that list are still with us in the coming centuries.

Sea of Tranquility
By Emily St. John Mandel
(Knopf, 272 pages, $25)

I received an advanced ebook copy from NetGalley.

I enjoyed this book. I wasn't sure where it was going at first, but once all of the stories and timelines started coming together, it kept me curious. There are references to characters in The Glass Hotel, which was fun to recognize. The time jumping aspect of it was unique and it is interesting how Mandel solves the mystery of the anomaly.

This book was fun to read and kept me guessing. Thank you to NetGalley for the ebook copy.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4419045221

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.

2 stars

At 80% I looked at other reviews and saw that a bunch of the characters were from her prior book, The Glass Hotel, which I couldn’t get into and never read. I never would have started reading this book without having read the prior book as a lot of the characters were the same.

Very slow start the came together at the end. I think if I had read the prior book I would have liked it better.

I finished Sea of Tranquility almost a month ago and am still thinking about it. The story was fast-paced and profound, and felt much more heavily sci-fi to me than ESJM's previous work, which I really enjoyed. There is a lot going on in the story but Mandel wraps it up beautifully; I know no other author who can do so much in so few pages. I'm already excited for whatever she does next!

I enjoyed Sea of Tranquility and would recommend it to fans of the author's previous work and to people who like "soft" science fiction/time-travel stories. It poses thought-provoking questions regarding the nature of reality and time, but not in an intimidating or difficult-to-follow way. I also appreciated that, though it touches on deep philosophical questions, it is never preachy or condescending. This book is shorter than Mandel's well-known prior works, but it does not suffer from being too short; indeed, I found the length appropriate and the story so well-paced that I had trouble putting it down. The narrative does fall prey to some of the plot holes prevalent in time travel stories, but this is a trivial complaint because the characters and story are for the most part interesting enough to make up for any minor inconsistencies in logic. However, my primary gripe with Sea of Tranquility concerns the sections about an author on a tour to promote a book. These passages are well-written, like the rest of the book, but I found that they caused me to focus not on what was happening in the story, but rather on what may have inspired them in the author's own experience as someone who has gone on similar publicity tours. I wasn't sure what, as a reader, I was intended to take away from that section of the book or why it was necessary to include those details, and ultimately this served as a distraction from the otherwise streamlined and engaging plot. Despite this, I thought Sea of Tranquility was great and overall I was satisfied with the story. I ordered a copy for my library and would not hesitate to recommend it.

This is my first Emily St. John Mandel’s book and definitely won’t be the last. I heard lots of good things about her previous work, “Station Eleven,” so I did not hesitate to grab the opportunity to read her most recent work. Sea of Tranquility is a brilliant, thought-provoking narrative that takes readers through time.

I learned that some of the characters from the last books reappeared in this novel. However, it was not necessary to read them to actually enjoy this novel. The plot started slow until maybe the 40-50% mark, but then after that I couldn’t put the book down. Not only the slow build up was worth hanging in and finishing, the connections of events all made sense and superbly paid off in the end, too. The narration leaped back and forth across different time and places. Moreover, the plot was well-written and full of interesting concepts. It also asked you questions about reality, humanity, time travel, and space. Although those topics sounded quite intimidating, but it did not overrun the plot.

Although most of the characters were not that much fleshed out, they were still interesting. On the other hand, the writing style was simple and beautiful.

Overall, Sea of Tranquility seamlessly weaves a story of how small actions can affect and resonate people throughout time. I highly recommend this one.

4.5 stars!

Mandel's books are always difficult to categorize and talk about...this one is no exception. It's a sequel to Glass Hotel but not. It's a sort of spiritual sequel to Station Eleven-- and it gets meta, detailing the experiences of a writer of a pandemic novel, during a pandemic. It has whiffs of Cloud Atlas. And time travel. It's a host of interesting characters dealing with a world where much is different than our own but much is still the same. It's gripping and lovely, and I recommend it.

Sea of Tranquility takes place throughout multiple centuries. The book starts with Edwin St. Andrew who has been sent into a kind of exile. His family sends him to Canada to make his own way after some of his comments at a dinner party. When in the woods one day, he experiences a strange phenomenon that he cannot explain. The book switches between several characters in different points in time, but they all have a strange connection to this phenomenon.
This was a really great book. The author does a fantastic job of creating interesting characters that manage to connect to each other in a real and organic way. I also loved that characters from her last book, The Glass Hotel, pop up in the book.

Completely original and beautifully executed, this novel is impressive in scope. Emily St. John Mandel writes a story that encompasses four or more different time periods, more than a handful of characters all within a creative and interesting plot. I thought this was brilliant fiction writing and did not know what to expect. The prose is eloquent and the complex plot comes together through skilled writing. Although this novel may not appeal to readers who aren't keen on science fiction or the premise of time travel, I thought this was excellent.

There is no feeling quite like that of being transported by literature. Reading a book that sends you through time and space, to far-flung locales both physical and metaphysical. Engaging with a narrative that is compelling in terms of the story being told and the thematic foundation upon which that story is built.

Mastering that sort of layered storytelling is something that most writers – including some tremendously gifted ones – never quite manage. But when that mastery is achieved, the resulting work can etch itself upon your mind and upon your heart.

Emily St. John Mandel has achieved that mastery.

Her new novel is “Sea of Tranquility,” a beautiful and complex tale of creativity and love spread across centuries. Marrying the power of familial bonds with the passage of time, bound together through the rippling reflections cast by the motion of generations, it is a book that ensnares the imagination and buoys the reader forward into the known unknown.

In the years preceding World War I, a young man named Edwin St. Andrew takes leave of his familial home in England. He is not the eldest, so he shall see no inheritance, and when he clashes with his mother over colonial ideologies, it is deemed best that he make his way across the sea. He lands in Canada and eventually makes his way to an isolated village in the wilderness, only to see and hear something so inexplicable that it shakes him to his core.

Centuries later, a writer named Olive Llewellyn has left her home in the second moon colony to undertake a book tour on Earth. Unbeknownst to her – and indeed, to the rest of the world – a pandemic looms, one that will have truly dire consequences. Her novel has proven prescient in many ways, but perhaps the most significant is a passage involving a mysterious vision.

In between, a woman seeks to reconnect with an old friend. That friend’s husband’s financial fraudulence – a Ponzi scheme – led to the woman’s husband taking his own life. The woman is nowhere to be found, but her brother - an experimental musician – accompanies one of his performances with a video that includes an uncanny moment of disruption.

Can it be that these moments are one and the same?

Connecting all of these threads is a man whose presence in all places and times should be impossible, yet due to the circumstances of his own existence – in yet another time and place – he is able to know that the connection is possible, though not what or why it might have come to be.

(I’ll confess that I’ve made a deliberate effort to be relatively vague here – while I believe a sense of the story is important in a review, I also think that Mandel offers up many wonderful and rewarding surprises scattered throughout. I’d hate to be responsible for someone losing that possibility of discovery.)

“Sea of Tranquility” is a delicate web of interconnectedness, a story whose many threads are woven together so subtly and smoothly that the reader almost doesn’t realize it is happening until the knots are complete. Each piece of the story, separated by time and space, is compelling in its own right, but it is only when we see the points of contact that we truly understand the intricacy of what Mandel has made for us.

Telling stories across multiple timelines has become something of a trope in recent years. In the hands of lesser writers, it can be something of a crutch, a way to prop up stories that might not stand strongly on their own. But when a master like Mandel goes to work, we get something that is far more than the sum of its parts, where the pieces are welded together with a gentle fire and reinforced into something stronger.

One of the joys of reading Mandel is her ability to evoke a sense of place. She is equally at home crafting representations of the past and predictions of the future, with a willingness to combine the two to create an upward narrative spiral. Few authors can sweep a reader up as readily as she does.

She’s no slouch when it comes to the creation of memorable characters either, imbuing everyone within these pages with a palpable humanity. The people who populate this book are real, flawed humans; sure, they occupy a world with fantastical elements, but their fundamental humanity is omnipresent. That humanity is key. We live and breathe with them. Their triumphs are ours, as are their tragedies.

“Sea of Tranquility” is a work of complex simplicity, if that makes sense. It is constructed in a detailed and deliberate way, worlds built atop worlds, yet the central themes are straightforward. Few things make me as a reader as happy as when speculative elements are effectively woven into literary fiction, so as you might imagine, I am EXTREMELY happy to get to read Mandel’s work in general and “Sea of Tranquility” in particular.

'Sea of Tranquility' reflects our pandemic woes through a time-travel lens

In Marienbad -- the fictional future pandemic novel that Emily St. John Mandel's latest work Sea of Tranquility revolves around — author Olive Llewellyn articulates the reluctance to name this world-changing event: "This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the word pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us."

It's a keen sentiment that in hindsight seems horribly accurate for the Covid-19 pandemic. It may well have been true, too, of the flu in 1918. And clearly history repeats itself in Sea of Tranquility, when a new pandemic in 2203 makes Olive's book the most unputdownable lockdown read. This meta narrative comes as no surprise, as Mandel's meticulously researched 2014 pandemic novel Station Eleven came across as oddly prescient in the first year of Covid in 2020. The release of the stellar TV adaptation in 2021 likely only increased Mandel's quasi-prophetic positioning within pop culture. So it stands to reason that the book she wrote during the early stages of the pandemic would be so self-reflective.

Sea of Tranquility is a tale of retrospects, of foresights, of the same moment layered on top of itself like repeated musical notes and of quotes that echo across time. Unlike Station Eleven, this book could not have been written before our particular pandemic. But while Sea of Tranquility both reflects our current crisis and revisits moments and characters from Mandel's preceding two books, it also demonstrates a creative leap for the author: It's the most explicitly science-fictional of her works, exploring time travel by way of a lunar colony in 2401. Despite this conceit wearing thin in parts, the prose never stutters.

Like Olive, it took Mandel about four novels before her audience really expanded, due in part to the hopeful, art-forward, post-apocalyptic future she envisioned with Station Eleven. The Glass Hotel, her 2020 follow-up, wound up being an alternate universe take on its predecessor, where the Georgia Flu doesn't kill 99 percent of the world's population — where instead these victims' lives end via a Ponzi scheme robbing them of their futures, either in terms of lost fortunes or more than one suicide. Even as that book's timeline diverges enough to erase the future of Year 20 and the Traveling Symphony, characters like the Bernie Madoff-esque billionaire investor Jonathan Alkaitis and his trophy wife Vincent Smith ponder parallel lives based on making different choices.

Though not as distinctly tied to the prior two books, Sea of Tranquility is its own related exercise in repetition. The slim volume recounts the same hyper-specific moment experienced by separate people in 1912, 1994, and 2195: an airship terminal within which echoes both the familiar strains of a violin and the distinctively futuristic whoosh of one of those hovercraft taking off. To some of the observers, it is banal; for others, this rip in the fabric of time upends entire worldviews. Decoding this moment propels the narrative, though Mandel's penchant for nonlinear storytelling structures the book more as a series of linked character studies climbing forward and then backwards in time.

Clearly drawn from real life, Sea of Tranquility never feels too self-indulgent. Mandel demonstrates yet again her talent for balancing an ensemble cast, with even the briefest of interludes making each character sympathetic and memorable, like strangers encountered at a party even if never seen again. This is especially impressive considering the main players exist in separate centuries, yet their respective troubles are relatable despite the differences in circumstance. While she returns to Caiette, the fictional village on Vancouver Island where The Glass Hotel is located, Mandel spends just as much time thoughtfully imagining humanity's escape from Earth to the moon colonies established in the Sea of Tranquility of the title.

The lunar colonies do suffer slightly from some spotty worldbuilding; Mandel establishes fascinating details about the socioeconomic divide concerning who grows up on literally the dark side of the moon, yet the colonies arrive so fully formed that their background feels incomplete. Aside from a mention of the Chinese president calling for the need to leave Earth as a proactive instead of reactive move, it is unclear whether the colonies are a global collaboration or competition. On a similar note, there is frequent travel back and forth between them (like Olive awkwardly visiting her parents on her book tour) yet any potential cultural tensions are not addressed. The absence of commentary on colonizing the lunar landscape seems unbalanced for a novel written with such a deliberately palindromic structure.

But such imperfections can be improved upon in the next go-round. Where Mandel succeeds is in reminding us that even the most life-changing, seemingly unique moments will eventually repeat themselves. No matter our fears in naming it, given enough time, there will always be a new pandemic (the deadly disease that threatens Olive and her kin is a childhood inoculation 200 years later). There will always be a young man sent into exile for pushing back against the status quo. There will always be inexplicable phenomena that make us feel very small and perhaps not-quite-real. Readers may be split on whether Station Eleven was too much to read during this point in history, but Sea of Tranquility provides a strange comfort.

When Olive is trapped in her own lockdown, with hologram meetings calling forth familiar Zoom fatigue for us readers, a conversation with a journalist helps her reflect on how "anything written this year was likely to be deranged." That may be true, but also what a treat to witness the inner workings of a celebrated author and especially this ambitious experimentation during a period in which we were all bouncing off the walls — in this case, seeing what sticks.

In a way, I wish that I did not get a review copy of this book because I just want to write 'this book is good. Trust me.'

It's a really wonderfully well-written book with great characters but when you look at the description it's hard to make it look like it's really insanely well-written. I mean it's about people dealing with a pandemic but seen through multiple times and several pandemics, Yet they deal in a way that is extremely recognizable. And then they move on with their life. And since one of the characters is a time traveler you get to know exactly what happens to those characters.

Trust me.

Emily Saint John Mandel is just an instant buy.

My first Emily St. John Mandel and I enjoyed it. Sections of the book jump around through time and space(literally), there are moon colonies, time travel, religion, pandemics, multiple dimensions/realities(I think?). The plot keeps it moving and kept my interest, I was never bored or struggling to get through it. Sometimes things were hard to follow but I just went with it and enjoyed the writing and the current setting and story and had faith it would all tie up and make sense(which it largely did).

I enjoyed some of the meta commentary of (what I assume is based on) the experience of the author promoting a book about a pandemic being made into a tv show directly before the onset of an actual pandemic, capturing the looming fear of this intangible thing hanging over your head and not realizing how bad it is until it’s too late. Mandel has a real knack for capturing pandemic vibes and existential crises(which I find especially impressive in regards to Station Eleven considering it was written pre covid).

I find Mandel’s biggest strength as a writer to be her ability to effectively capture the struggle of maintaining love and humanity and meaning in the face of unthinkable obstacles and tragedy. This book made me feel a lot but it mostly made me feel human, and made me feel empathy for like, everyone.

An enjoyable, dream-like novel that fans of Mandel's other works will enjoy. This is technically a stand-alone novel, but there are so many references to Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel that you would miss and not understand the depth of their interconnection (it's more than just a character from another book showing up). She's woven a delicate spider's web between the three novels.

This is very much a science fiction novel (moon colonies, time travel, pandemics, air ships) despite the author's attempts at downplaying the futuristic technology to potentially make this appealing to a broader audience. For example, the characters in this book span 500 years yet the language, mannerism, and one assumes dress, are similar as there is no confusion when people from different times meet. The only issue was that people from the future couldn't read cursive, but that's happening now. Maybe this works for others not quiet so invested in science, but it didn't ring true to me. And I'd like to think that in 200 years we'd come up with a better method of virtual work meetings than Zoom.

A compelling work of speculative fiction, told over the course of 300 years and through multiple characters, that handles the concept of time travel in a unique way--by questioning the very fabric of reality.
When many authors are avoiding any mention of pandemics in their fiction, Mandel has the concept running through her book, as indeed pandemics have run throughout human history.
This book kept me turning the pages and left me with ample food for thought.